Toward a Bioregional State

Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

If I Were U.S. President, I Would Get Elected with the Promise to Resign to Work on This Bioregional Platform as More Important

Removing the Seal after the Promised Resignation

Every American child dreams of being President. However, every American adult understands that simply being President might be pointless or even a distraction for the kinds of political changes they want.

I thought about that when I read that the German Kiwi Kim Dotcom, after an illegal take-down by the United States out of its jurisdiction a year ago, decided to be reborn as a CEO with his Megabox project. Since he had so many complaints about how crazily insane the U.S. had treated him, he was asked what would be his policies if he was U.S. President to rectify this. As I read his admirable list--that trenchantly touched on many topics censored by the U.S. billionaire-driven politics of both left and right--I thought, 'well it's only fair that if the U.S. overreached its jurisdiction, that the irrepressible Kim Dotcom can overreach his in offering such a pie-in-the-sky platform without any pretension he could actually implement it from that position, even if he was U.S. President.'

This is because platforms have nothing to do with deciding the U.S. Presidency. When the going price of the Presidency is nearly 300 million dollars spent by both Democratic and Republican Candidates, what determines the presidency is how many billionaires you have on your side's speed-dial against the other side's list of billionaires on their speed-dial. Even for Kim Dotcom though, the U.S. Presidency obviously has quite a large amount of 'bling' value as people think 'if only the right people could get into that position, things could change, etc.' This is because he thinks (as most likely think) that U.S. Presidents are allowed to make decisive changes.

However, with the position's purchase price intentionally above all realistic possibility of change of policy against the global billionaires anymore, the U.S. President is just the ultimate billionaire's bling purchase. The only 'change' of policy is what faction of billionaires next get to successfully warp either left and right toward their similar globalist policies. Thus the financial and policy organization of the United States--both left or right--has a billionaire's glass ceiling. U.S. Presidential candidates are gophers for the same rarefied aristocratic globalist class that have no loyalties to anything except themselves--except perhaps their loyalty to destroying democratic procedures and using state funds, laws, or wars to enhance their financial portfolios.

3. And if you think for a moment that armed rebellion works, remember that
they have all the guns, drones, and spy satellites and they are just
looking for an excuse to use them. So don't encourage their pretexts.
The only 'terrorists' in the U.S.A. at present are those pitifully that
the FBI has to arm, organize, train, and suggest targets authorized by
the FBI itself. Then the FBI arrests them for being patsies instead of terrorists. In a just land, we would arrest the FBI mass psychological manipulators who thought that up.

The kind of politics swarming around the U.S. and its Presidency now has zero interest in democracy, rule of law, transparency, commodity health, or human and civil rights or the nation itself--much less environmental security, human health, and the general welfare of all. For example:

The U.S. Supreme Court will likely authorize police dogs outside all houses without a warrant; there is already the NDAA that authorizes any president to be a mafia don to kill any U.S. citizen--or anyone worldwide such is the hubris of the billionaires--killed secretly without evidence or trial, including via assassination machines like drones that are armed and fly through the sky. The U.S. courts just approved of that tyranny. Both Obama and Romney love drone assassinations of Americans without trial and approve of appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner simultaneously. These tyrannies of unmanned drones with anonymous killers behind them massacre whole communities like in the past year over 200 group massacres by robots from the sky over Pakistan--and the U.S. is not even at war with Pakistan. Meanwhile, in the U.S, there are illegal 'papers please' checks without warrants or due cause anywhere within 100 miles of the borders (which is most of the U.S. population). Obama as president has been funding and arming Mexican drug cartels. The vote fraud rigging has gone national, etc. The list could go on for miles.

It is all there: the sign of the end of the American experiment, and the rise of the American Frankenstein. It has been going on for years. It is time for a bioregional state that raises from the grave the billionaire-destroyed human rights and civil rights and combines it with greater local democratic control over material issues.

It is little wonder that a recent Rasmussen poll (September 2012) found that Americans considered government corruption to be the second most important issue (at 66% agreeing with that). However, that is hardly being talked about even by the third party candidates. The U.S. is corrupt, the grand majority knows it, yet they are kept from having any other ideas. This corruption is so thorough it mortgages the future. It has an effect on crushing any kinds of checks and balances that exist anywhere including those of other ideas, civil rights, or even the right to choose one's own food, choose one's own medicine, or choose one's own education that might challenge such a consolidated oligarchic feudalism of billionaires in their desire to cripple people intellectually into their serfs.

So the U.S. repeatedly invents pretexts to launch further into a complete police state, repeatedly lowers educational standards, repeatedly defrauds its own currency to destroy the people's wealth, and repeatedly lets recidivist corporations poison people and the environment.The future that U.S. unrepresentative elites want is a transnational feudalism and a seamless global police state without any civil rights for anyone.

The U.S. left or right are warped into this billionaire-biased globalism into dismantling democracy and transparency, with no one representing the people first. Instead Democrats and Republicans both equally take international cash for their 'national' elections. Both want more billionaire-desired centralization, tyranny, secrecy, and power for themselves, while they want everyone else decentralized, monitor-able and out of touch of politics to keep people poor and divided.

The billionaires and their candidates may collectively joust against each other in feudal fashion over which aristocratic families can fund the largest U.S. Presidential campaign pageantry, though always as a group they decide on the pageant's delimited goals and the limited political spectrum of inclusion for those who only support this transnational feudal arrangement they want. Democrats and Republicans appeal to those that are gullible every four years and can be duped into supporting the same global oligarchy for four more years--that they had before--under a different symbolic leadership appeal. And if they support someone else, there's always vote fraud to make sure the votes are uncounted, and there's always arrests of other legal candidates attempting to tell everyone they are actually running for office. So I fail to see how any change can come from elections first, now.

Plus, since many of the next generation of American youth after every four years think it is their duty to be fooled at least once into supporting one billionaire's boy-toy or another one, you only have to fool suckers that are born every minute. The others, already burned and jaded, stay out of sight in embarrassment that they were duped four years previously. That withdrawal suits the billionaires as their strategy of making the Democrats and Republicans two versions of the same policy. It has been so in every U.S. Presidential election since the election of 1900: the goal being merely to find a bunch of fresh voters in which to harvest the next betrayal of their trusting innocence every four years. 1896 was the last actual competitive U.S. Presidential Election in terms of policy difference. After that, it has been an oligarchic 'circle the wagons' of two versions of the same policy for over 100 years. Perhaps we should update that analogy: the U.S. elites are 'circling their armor-plated limousines' against the rest of the population.

However, unlike Kim Dotcom, I thought on the other hand, that being President or even dreaming to be President would demonstrate that I thought that being President is somehow a priority at this point--something of which I disagree with in fact. I don't think being U.S. President matters anymore, and I don't encourage anyone to dream of change coming through U.S. elections now at all. I don't encourage them to consider that violence is the only other option either. Moreover, I don't encourage them to dream of politicians or of being politicians who would do that change either (at least yet), whether it be dreams about themselves or dreams about others. Other more important things matter. Plus, electoral democratic procedures and open debate have been closed off in a 'no free speech zone.'

So, in this dystopic world of the United States, if I were to have a Presidential Platform to popularize, it would be the following:

The issues in order would be:

- first to get elected and then resign on this platform: that I promise to refuse the position if elected. Because what is important currently is working on building a novel Ecological Reformation of regional institutions since only from that will you see any improvement on the wider cross-bioregional level (previous known as states).

- next, encourage in all watersheds of the world the CDI (Civic Democratic Institution) and CEI (Commodity Ecology Institution) relationships. This is by far the most important catalyzing point, so read it about it at the link. It sets up 'bioregional tribunes' for representing any regional geography's culture, materials, and politics. It is important for regions to get clear on what particular futures they want together, in a democratic and deliberative fashion. There are many ways to keep both gatherings--civic and material--from becoming unrepresentative of a region on these two points as well. This keeps all watersheds of the world on track for democratic deliberation and regional sustainability. This is contrary to the kinds of cultures and material politics that parties set up, with their distant ideological manipulations and splittings (and empty promises or unreliable dependencies). Both sets of bioregional tribunes are an important ongoing living check and balance, in order to construct an ongoing separate regional self-awareness in culture and material concerns that is distinct from how simultaneous multiple distant ideological political parties would attempt to divide a region in a delimited and dependent fashion. It is bioregional capacity building in culture and material politics. It is commons facilitation.

- as a combined meeting hall for these two
institutions, construct one demonstration green building in each watershed of the
country (or any country); combine it with a farmers market/festival hall; surround it by a garden maintaining heirloom seeds for a regional seed bank (described further below); combine the building it with a citizen's scientific/environmental monitoring station to get
data that corrupt governments refuse to collect on air, water, food, and soil
quality as well as on regional environmental inequalities and
injustices; the building is equipped with regionally sound choices of
locally sourced materials and technologies as well as surrounded by an heirloom seed garden--all as symbols of where we are
going into the future.

- encourage consumptive changes toward more sustainable choices of regionally sourced materials; encourage jurisdictions to be created for regional 'bionationalization' over development decisions (regional checks and balances on regional environmental common property and balanced ownership scales); put several examples of agroecology, agroforestry, and permacultural projects in every watershed of the world--to learn how to best organize against degradative monocropping.

- So all your seeds aren't in the same basket, and aren't in an international GMO/pesticide corporation's gatekeeping basket since they own the seed banks now and destroy them in their conflicts of interest, set up two or three examples of 'organic heirloom gardens' per watershed as your own seed bank. These are seed-saving and seed-distributing gardens of all examples of heirloom seed varieties of food crops and other varieties that grow well in the region without toxic chemicals and which are connected to the cultural use of the region. These heirloom gardens accept seed donations as well as serve as a 'seed bank' for the bioregional area culturally and materially. These heirloom gardens are for the purpose of learning, feeding the schools, and providing seeds to the schools for (re)planting projects as well. Schools visit all these different material sites as part of the learning process.

- Furthermore, given the corruption possible in forms of green labeling administered from far away, instead keep labeling local. In addition to the CEI's other purposes, I encourage that the CEI (commodity ecology institution) as well is the administrative reviewer and issuer of the bioregion's locally controlled green certification and green labeling program. The CEI administrates a 'bioregional green logo.' This logo can be awarded to any businesses that makes items for sale (including though hardly limited to food creators) to certify and to symbolize that their practices and products fit well within the local bioregional relationships better than other products available, cleanly and greenly. "Buy bioregional" in other words. Certify such best practices and best products in your region so that consumers in the region--as well as outside the region--can trust they are helping by their purchases to move toward that bioregional future of greater regional choices in any region. The 'bioregional green' logo lets consumers know what are the region's best sustainable and regionally-integrated practices of waste handling and creation of products in materials available. Even the regional currency can be given the regional logo--or it can loose it by bad administration. So the CEI can award and revoke such a label as well. Even reviewing any certification every two years (or upon complaint to the CEI) can be an instructive part of the school's education of how to keep regional democratic sustainability. The 'bioregional green logo' can be a general policy issue of how to issue ongoing course corrections and recognitions of excellence toward that bioregional future.

- encourage federal, state, and local governments to make all their
buildings become green buildings--to generate their own electricity in
different regionally sound ways and to be off any electrical grid as a
sign of clientelism to corporations and lack of autonomy. Instead,
government buildings should all be various regionally sound green
buildings, and all transportation, computers, paper, foods, etc. used by
the bureaucracy and elected representatives and their staffs should be entirely sustainable and keyed to supporting
these regional issues by their institutional purchases as well. Otherwise, they erode their own country and destroy it. These better infrastructural issues are sorely required in the quickly decaying infrastructures of the United States. A great green rebuilding campaign across schools, local democratic institutions, agricultural reorganization, and government buildings, can re-energize the economy and the spirit of the country--or any country for that matter.

The argument of the bioregional state is that sustainability is unachievable without formal democratic institutional change (that would
interact with other institutional additions in educational frameworks,
local consumptive issues, and financial issues).

Other people
have offered other methods to get to sustainability of course. What
about these different methods to get there? Other routes are only
indirect, susceptible to corruption, and have a history of backsliding.

Second,
a single party it is a poor strategy for sustainability because support
for greenness comes from across the left-right spectrum seen in above
polls for global supermajorities supporting green politics. This makes a
single informal party a poor strategy for mobilizing toward
sustainability. It is perhaps ultimately self-defeating and
self-divisive of the commonality of views on greenness to attempt to fit
'green' into one party framework. (That being said, I do support
various forms of green parties however just without expecting that the
model of political change for sustainability can ever be achieved by a
singular party).

On
the contrary, it is political, economic, and technological corruption
and gatekeeping against the massive supermajorities of the world that is
keeping us from sustainability. Corruption is keeping us from living in
representative democracies and maintaining a representative
developmentalism. This corruption keeps us living within crony raw material regimes instead of arrangements more democratic and consumer-choice driven that would look closer to the commodity ecology arrangement instead of commodity arrangements that destroy the planet.

In
existing democracies many conflicts of interest keep unsustainability
in place. Only by creating additional formal 'ecological checks and
balances' can we address these conflicts of interest and innately allow
our political economies to be more directly 'in sync' with this global
support for environmentalism, sound economics, and sound health
practices.

To summarize, [1] unsustainability is corruption and
conflict of interest. [2] This corruption is created by 'out of sync'
formal institutional arrangements in states that create an informal
gatekeeping on politics, instead of formal institutions creating
representation in politics. [3] This gatekeeping and
unrepresentativeness has a developmental effect toward environmental
degradation and self-destruction [4] contrary to public support. [5] It
is additionally contrary to polls showing sustainabilility to be the
supermajority and popular concern of the world.

This is why the
bioregional state approaches sustainability as requiring a more
competitive democracy--to remove the informal corrupt gatekeeping
frameworks to make the state a democratic institution 'in sync' with
environmental concern, formally. The bioregional state would do this
through over 60 additional 'ecological checks and balances'.

Getting
over this morass of formal/informal corruption interactions requires
identifying the many conflicts of interest in 'still incomplete'
democracies that require more 'ecological checks and balances' to demote
informal gatekeeping and unrepresentative developmental policies. Sustainability
is a completed democracy with many additional checks and balances
against formal and informal power corruption that would made
developmental policy feedback automatically more represenative and
ecologically sound.

Several other more technocratic or
even genocidal methods have been proposed of course for sustainability.
The book argues against these as well, from a green humanism point of view. From the book description:

"Toward A Bioregional State is a novel approach to development and to sustainability. It proposes that instead of sustainability being [fourth] an issue of population scale, [fifth] managerial economics, or [sixth]
technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is
required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with
the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption.
Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current
formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal
gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as
ecologically “out of sync”. The bioregional state argues that we are
unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological
checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote
corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for
gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics
that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized."

- encourage state and local governments to accept regional currencies as legal tender for debts public and private; multiple currencies are required as a check and balance between store of value and exchange value in the financial infrastructure--giving people more choices for a stable value for currency more free from manipulations of larger investors, banks, currency flows, or even governments. Every state should have its own regional currency acceptable for tax purposes, in addition to wider federal money, for a check and balance between currencies to allow people to avoid the destruction of their wealth by currency inflation. They can move their wealth between currencies whenever this is seen to be occurring, further reducing such inflationary manipulations from the grass roots side. The CEI (commodity ecology institution) is full of such local sustainable material choices that equally accept such local currencies as legal tender, particularly in the watershed's main farmer's market mentioned above.

- encourage state and local governments to have paper ballots and remove electronic voting and tabulating machines that have been demonstrated to rig elections worldwide; e-voting machines are fraudulent means of holding an election. They only implant a single global e-mafia over elections of countries worldwide.

- after all that is done, perhaps about a generation or so, then you can work on wider state institutional changes toward sustainability on the larger level in Toward a Bioregional State and start running people for elections from multiple parties on this same platform.

- I might run once more after that, though now? Forget it. Most countries of the world are degradative lost causes that should urge their citizens to think of better futures instead of vote or support their current futureless elites ambivalently. There is one exception so far: perhaps Bhutan is making itself a world leader in ideas toward actual sustainability of materials and culture and democracy as interlinked. Learn from it's government, materials policies, education, and financial relationships--and better yet, learn from its culture that holds it together. However, other aspects of Bhutan's culture and state policies toward culture are profoundly dystopian as it is very repressive to minorities. You might learn from Ladakh as well since it is rebuilding itself on these lines. You might learn from bioregionalist Bolivia and some aspects of bioregionalist New Zealand as they are rebuilding themselves somewhat on these lines as well. In other ways though New Zealand is quite a dystopian bad place. [1][2]

- after all that is done, start running people for office on the platform of removing any private central bank cartels; on removing corporate citizenship after 'three strikes'; on keeping CEOs from being representatives concurrently while they are in office in the interest of wider checks and balances These are several points in the model Constitution of Sustainability enclosed in Toward a Bioregional State;

- even perhaps re-passing (and revoking) supposed U.S. amendments that have been ignored by the federal government that did pass or others that failed to pass where the federal government pretended that it did. Respectively, I'm talking about the 'original' 13th Amendment--the one many states passed in the 1800s--concerning keeping lawyers
or anyone from setting themselves up as a special caste for certain elections only,
like lawyers have for judgeships); and I'm talking about revoking others that failed to pass that the U.S.
federal government lied in saying actually passed like the federal
income tax, since there is some question whether it really passed or was
just 'performed' to have passed by the federal government in 1913. Both changes would reveal the true state of US civil politics instead of based on
corrupt centralized politics alone.

Inset on this issue:

======================================

THEME: There seems to be cases of Amendments being passed and then
ignored in state versus federal contention over recognizing them. This would be the original 'hidden'
13th anti-lawyer amendment, against "honors" and even removing citizenship
for accepting them (which would in practice both remove lawyers'
citizenship if they accept foreign BAR registration, and removing all
federal legislation that creates certain 'honors' or differentiations
among people, and against limiting public offices to only one 'honored'
group (like District Attorneys or judges 'requiring' to be lawyers seems
to have been struck down by 1819 at the latest). Moreover, there goes
the welfare state redistribution frameworks if the federal government is
unable to create differentiation in honor by laws or differences in
taxation frameworks. There went slavery you might add by 1819 as well).

On the other hand, there are opposite cases: cases of Amendments that
were rejected by states though pretended to be enacted by the federal
government anyway--i.e., pretended to be passed (like the 16th amendment:
federal income tax, which seems to be the case).

The cases show huge contention over the issue of what becomes accepted
culturally and legally as an amendment is hardly always so transparent.

Adask who is interviewed in the second videos summarizes the 13th amendment claim from its
two original discovers in Maine, who contacted him in the late 1980s
because they had a lot of information they had assembled. Adask was a
publisher of an "anti-lawyer" magazine and summarized the two
researcher's works in three articles he said in his magazine over
several months by the early 1990s. Adask then with the researchers
published a book about it as well, with "60-80" photocopies of the
archival research mentioning/documenting the original/hidden 13th
amendment. Adask relates in the second video link that the original
researchers went back to the same archives a few years later. Across
over a dozen states the previous information they found had been
scrubbed out and removed.

In short, the first claim is that from 1812-1860, many states published
versions of the U.S. Constitution with already 13 Amendments. After the
US Civil War, the growing centralized power of the Northern victors
removed this amendment and hid it--though it was already a contentious
issue that the federal government refused to accept as ratified it seems
even then, even as many states and territories did. Read that hidden
amendment at the first video link from a certified copy of New
Hampshire's record that it passed it. It lists in beautiful longhand of
the period the other six or so states that had already passed it by 1812
as well.

The journalist who is interviewing Adask adds his second claim. His
interpretation is that there was a link to this Amendment being nearly
passed (Adask says 8 of 9 required then had passed it before 1812 war
started) by the requisite number of state legislatures then and the
US-British War of 1812. I have always seen 1812 war interpreted as an
issue of the US rejecting the private foreign bank arrangement by then,
so Britain attempted to get an expensive war going with its ex-colony so
as to force the US back into desperate borrowing (i.e., foreign debt,
and private central bank) once more. Adask against the journalists just
seems to imply that it became less of an issue to pass until President
Monroe was elected and he directly asked the remaining states whether
they would further ratify the hidden 13th amendment. Adask claims that
Virginia did so, through their U.S. Constitution from 1819 starting to
show the original/hidden 13th amendment. That would be the total of nine
required. However, the federal government it seems refused to accept
this judgement and ignored it, even as more and more states passed it
over time. When after the U.S. Civil War in 1865, the 'next' 13th
amendment was passed by Lincoln's government, effectively sealing two
versions of history competing against each other: the original states' initiated and passed 13th amendment and
the later federal initiated 13th amendment--now with two different entirely different topics.

It brings up an important question: if the federal government refuses to
accept what the states do to change the constitution, what authority can
actually force the federal government to submit. No one it seems. That's
a big flaw in the U.S. Constitution, if you take this from a
constitutional engineering perspective. Or it's a big flaw that it was
already that corrupt by then already.

Frankly, I've heard about this hidden 13th amendment before. However,
what is interesting here is this is the first bit of historical
documentation I have seen about it--so I thought I would pass it on to
you as you I am sure continue to wonder what the hell is the U.S. is in
the first place. I'll have to read more about this person's research.

And on the 16th amendment:

The inverse seems to have occurred: the federal government wanted
an amendment that the states had rejected, so the federal government
pretended it was passed (or bribed others or threatened them into
compliance). Another constitutional flaw here.
On this point, another interesting book to find/read is 'the law that never was' on how
the U.S. federal income tax amendment was never really passed by enough
states (he did the archival work in all states to verify this).

Instead, it was just 'announced' as passed by the 1910s by some major
bankers who were in Wilson's Cabinet then who were involved
in the U.S. Federal Reserve plan. Of course the US courts begged to
disagree with that author, and jailed him for failing to file a tax return on his
income--even if the law itself was questionable as just a federal figment of their imagination.
Even if it is a federal figment of their imagination, it is a delusion that is backed up by extreme violence of the U.S. federal government on this issue.

Suggestions for improvement:

Perhaps it is better to have an amendments passed by assembled public
meeting in the Capitol with state documents exhibited about any
amendments passed/unpassed. I think in this way it avoids both cover up
situations of the 13th and 16th occurring in one way or the other way in
the future--if there is going to be a future for the United States as a
constitutional republic that is, perhaps a rather silly an expectation
by now I believe.

======================================

Returning to my Presidential campaign platform for resignation and why, I'm hardly the one to argue that complete destruction or removal of the current degradative arrangements is likely, possible or ideal without first establishing better institutional, material, and cultural forms you want to transfer towards. So in other words, if all you do is complain or destroy, all you do is dig a larger hole. Instead, use the hole you are in to build a novel foundation upwards: get to work on building what you want. There is already in place a massive number of people from the world's largest social movement to help you built this better world of greater ecological self-interest expressed across multiple regions of the world first. Only you--in your networking with your neighbors of any political stripe--can work on that building. Get to know them with these suggestions toward a more environmental citizenship.

Destruction alone just creates more instabilities, more desperate populations, and greater crises. If all you work on is destruction or merely passively wait on destruction, you merely are in the volunteer employ of those you dislike by playing into the hands of the dictatorially degradative that you oppose. Creating something beautiful is what is actually revolutionary, transformative, and (ecologically) reformative--while destruction is merely reactionary.

Conclusion

In short, instead of expecting a single leader to save you or expecting that destroying something will save you, invent. Concentrate on novel networks or inventions--material, institutional, and cultural--that would allow you and us greater choices--whether in our ongoing daily purchasing and socializing actions instead of some over-romanticist violent change. This will work to erode and to remove these billionaires' global mafia and their particularly degradative raw material regimes from our lives and regions. Degradation is supported more by ambivalence of consumers and citizens instead of active support, and those people who are ambivalently adhering are waiting for a better arrangement of their lives to adhere to, actually. Provide it, and the dynamics of degradative support erodes away. The wider issue of an Ecological Reformation is required. Forget
Presidential politics or which puppet head takes charge of a degradative Punch and Judy beast
for the moment. It matters of course, though policy reform directed from the larger levels of jurisdiction is a ridiculous belief at present.

For peace and for a better world, thanks for electing me. I'll resign shortly and get to work on these more important tasks above.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Seventeen Points Toward an Environmental Citizenship

“The true revolutionary is
singing the canary’s song in the mine shaft. It is a song of alarm and a song
of beauty. He has become hyper-alert and what he observes is that the injustice
has gone on too long and his people are suffocating. They are dazed from
asphyxia and he is singing furiously to wake them up while they can still be
woken, while there is still power in their limbs to knock a hole in the walls
and let in the air they have been denied. That is the revolutionary’s
alchemy—to transform this great anger he feels into a life-saving song that
will command the attention of his people and move them to act.” -- Elan Le
Vieux, The Limits of Violence: Lessons of a Revolutionary Life (2001)
[online e-book download]

"Hey there I am researching Environmental citizenship. I'm looking into what makes a good environmental citizen? Have any advice where to start? or good articles, chapters, etc. Thanks."

I elaborate this below based on what I have written and what I have read. I frame my answer as mixed between two poles of "institutional" support (including economic, material/technological choices of support or rejection; different versions of educational curricula support; different financial currency use support, etc.) and personal decisions. These institutional and personal decisions build on each other into a list of principles on how to facilitate environmental citizenship institutionally as well as what makes a "good environmental citizen."

1. I would say a good environmental citizen is someone who has the virtue to facilitate environmental citizenship in others in their local region and with wider views than their local region--by their personal examples and by their organizational leadership abilities for others. (On how to be a good environmental citizen in facilitating it in yourself and others institutionally, see the last point on suggestions of how to start environmental citizenship and culturally as an ongoing concern, as an expression of local virtues in your area now.)

Regardless of how wonderful you make your own local bioregion or watershed, if the people upstream or upwind of you pollute themselves, they pollute you as well. Thus an entirely localist view of environmental citizenship is thus only part of this virtue. Similarly, on the other extreme, if all you care about are abstracts like global environmental concerns while ignoring specific environmental injustices, pollutions, and friendships on the street that happen daily in your own region, you have the opposite difficulty of attempting to frame environmentalism as just another placeless ideology when its support comes from across the political spectrum in specific regions. If all you care about is attachment to a particular placless party ideology, then you have misunderstood the origin of environmental sentiment. If you come from a particular ideological partisan view that wants to use environmentalism for you own partisanship that alienates others, you misunderstand the sentiments that you are seeking to organize or mobilize and you hamper or even cripple your own success.

Being a good environmental citizen can start with individual regional and wider concerns. However, it if stops there or just gets organized as another ideology built for partisan clientelism it is stillborn. This is because environmental conditions in a region are shared instead of individual, shared across the political spectrum instead of partisan.

(Because such environmental feedback is shared, this is one suggestion why I suggest watershed electoral districting instead of partisan incumbent districting: it makes all parties compete for the same shared, common, background ecological self-interest in a particular region instead of election debates being gatekept and/or instead of elections themselves being gerrymandered and virtually pre-decided before elections even start by aiming to return unrepresentative corrupt partisan people to power instead of aiming to find the best representatives of a common region.)

So keep in mind that environmental sentiment and thus environmental citizenship is not a partisan issue (link to assembled polls mentioned in this piece half way down), not an isolated issue to certain regions of the world [polls in Peritore 1999], and not an issue that concerns only affluent groups in certain regions of the world [ known as the 'postmaterialism' thesis--falsified here: more polls: Riley's study of 24 nations; Inglehart 1993].

So, inversely, all the common problems of environmental degradation are caused if we socialize in only partisan ways in the region concerning environmental issues, instead of working to establish a common regional feedback that something is wrong in the region The common problems of environmental degradation and the hampering of environmental citizenship are thus partially cultural and partially due to only having available in the region very unrepresentative organizations (whether politics, education, etc.) that support unrepresentative, delocalized forms of clientelism in the region to those outside of it (instead of all clientelism to blame, since there can be representative clientelism), and the same in economics, politics, ideologies, and jurisdictions that place their unrepresentative fingers in particular regions seeking to create partisan divisions in the regional public as well in the process, to frustrate fuller environmental feedback.

2. The result of this is that people who live near you though think differently--or even though who live far away--are still your allies in other words on environmental issues so treat them respectfully as the citizen peers that they are when discussing "environmental issues".

3. Environmental issues are typically framed in three separated areas of health, ecology/environment, and economics--even though these are all interlinked. Instead when environmental issues are framed as an issue of common environmental citizenship in a region (instead of as partisan social movements) the actual regional interests are best defined as the common non-partisan local concerns of the conditions of health, ecology, and economics versus those that encourage its destruction that benefit from it while living outside of it. That is what environmental citizenship stands for. Environmental issues as the basis of citizenship are the opposite of a wedge issue, because they bring the 'strangest' non-ideological alliances between different ideological groups of left, right, and inbetween together and second, because innately local issues of health, ecology, and economics overlap: everyone cares about the environment because we all live in particular regions. However, if environmental issues are divided into thirds or are divided into ideologies and afterwards discussed separately, extracted, and taken out of particular regional contexts to discuss them, they justify only a very shallow partisan and unrepresentative definition of what is the environmental concern--one that is beneficial to unrepresentative outside influences in the region who have an interest in encouraging partisanship wedges within the region. Thus such partisanship or piecemeal analysis on issues of common environmental citizenship only serves the growing degradative power of such external unrepresentative elites. You sabotage your own environmental citizenship facilitation if you are partisan on these issues, non-regional, or if you only consider environment in terms of one of these three focus areas instead of all three as intearctive in particular regions: health, environment, and economic developmental policy.

Thus the environmental concern is a humanocentric concern among regional peers instead of something against humanity. These three issues are human issues as much as they are environmental ones. However, some still want to talk about a 'human-only' health movement, an 'anti-human' view of an ecological movement, or an 'anti-environmental' view of an economic development as separate. And if you typically mobilized separately in this fashion, you divide your innate environmental citizenship and make yourself clients to those who have misframed environmental issues as either partisan, falsely dichotomous (as "pro-human" or "pro-environment" as if these are different issues), or if solutions for the region are discussed without an integrated view of human/environmental development of health, ecology, and economics. If the divisions are kept, they generate rather self-divided partisan movements of environmentalism useful to maintain its lack of representation. If all these divisions are healed, you have the beginnings of an environmental citizenship that is immune to external (or internal!) attempts to divide it.

4. To the contrary, what brings people together should be concentrated upon in citizenship mobilizations, and avoiding partisan based mobilizations. The former is the origin of environmental virtue, while the latter is the origin of environmental factional failure. Concentrate on solving common policies that degrade the region, common bad material choices in the region, and common bad institutional arrangements that make a degraded future--all to be changed in time instead of concentrating on various ideological propositions that exist nowhere in the region. You have to learn about the specific history and past choices of your region that led to a degradative outcome in health, ecology, and economy. You have to learn about the interactions and divisions between all citizens in your region (instead of just your faction) toward bringing them together. You have to learn more about these interactions of bad health, bad environment, and bad economics to get to better health, better environment, and better economics for all. You will rise together in environmental citizenship and environmental virtue or you will sink separately in partisan, divided environmentalism.

5. Effectively, environmental citizenship 'has no enemies'--as a principle. Even your enemies have an environmental citizenship that they deny for themselves and in which denial they are hurting others and themselves.

6. However, moving in the real world against difficulties of degradation, you will encounter two types of people at least opposed to environmental citizenship, the leaders of degradation and the followers of degradation, though it is their connections and support of the above three issues underlined that are the difficulty instead of the people themselves. If they were just individual people, it would be much easier to get to sustainability. However, it is their connections that lead to degradation, so severing their connections is paramount for environmental citizenship and improvement of the region's environmental virtues. First, there are the leaders of degradation. They are the people connected to bad raw material regime choices. It is bad raw material regime choices that leads to degradation. So remove these bad choices. The leadership of degradation benefits in a short-term way to degradation despite long term trends of such choices toward suboptimal arrangements of health, ecology, and economics when there are always other options. The second group of people opposed to environmental citizenship are the followers of degradation. They are the people ambivalently connected to these bad leadership decisions and supporting them in either excitedly loyal, opportunistic, passive, habitual, or ambivalent ways--it's different for different people. Both groups of people require convincing demonstrations that there are better future options for the region in health, ecology, and economics than the current degradative bad choices. Your job as an environmental citizen is providing better options of future choice--particularly for the latter. This will cause this second group's disaffection from the first group's degradative leadership decisions far better than attacking either group personally. Such personal attacks of either group will only solidify their connections with each other and it makes your environmental concern look entirely reactionary and without any virtuous ideas for the future improvement of the region.

These people are tied to each other across many institutions down the bad material's use or its bad organization as short term beneficiaries of it. This is much wider than simply the owners or the CEOs of a business--it goes to the workers, the consumers, the bought-and-paid-for scientists at the local university, other associated businesses and corporations, newspaper editors that depend on advertisement revenue, the local bank or local branch of an international bank that funds them, all major political party members that set policy to benefit degradation and its subsidization and cover up its crimes, to medical doctors on their payroll as well.

These bad raw material regime relationships of degradation extend to any other nefarious and incestuous relationships we can only imagine that go on out of public purview (like corrupt judges getting their children a job in said degradative context and biasing court suits in the degrader's favor, or corrupt judges that are connected with the banks themselves, doing the same; like newspaper attacks against environmental citizenship created by the degrader's threats to remove advertising money from the paper if the paper is sympathetic to sustainability issues in the region and the bad choice that a certain material has become). Overall all these people and their grouped choice and defense of material, policy, and institutional design preference (like "public energy" plants--that can only be used for private coal or nuclear instead of really being public) fail to fit any long-term citizenship interest much less any short term daily consumer interest (that includes themselves) because their choices create a degradative self-destructive political and economic landscape as part of these raw material regimes. Such a destructive array of people tied to a bad material choice is truly a slow 'death of a thousand cuts' for a region and its people. A bad raw material regime choice means we get ruled by an ecological tyranny.

This degrading group works with and sometimes against each other, depending on the issue, as becomes a degradative raw material regime. This is a form of rule by ecological tyranny unforeseen hundreds of years ago when ideas for an abstract democracy were conceived as a political ideal of checks and balances. Now, toward a bioregional state we require other ecological checks and balances. However, we have to create many bioregional support frameworks for it first before we get there to that cross-bioregional goal.

If bad raw material regimes work across four main institutional areas attempting to damage and trying to hinder any organizing toward environmental citizenship, then ecological checks and balances in these four institutional areas are now required to align and to maintain environmental citizenship as an institutional issue instead of just as a personal issue. Institutions in other words by their poor design of their being prone to gatekeeping and unrepresentative clientelism can be bad environmental citizens and they can raise bad environmental citizens. Therefore, suggested institutional checks and balances are beyond mere state check and balances: the include how to change education as part of an environmental citizenship mobilization; how to change consumption as part of it, and how to change finance (a post coming later).

The bad raw material regime works by trying to politically hinder the ideological debate about choices for citizens in policy and institutional design for the future; and they damage and try to economically hinder the material debate about choices for consumers in the market toward only talking about their degradative options and trying to sell these alone. Well, this is an incomplete market, and this is an incomplete democratic debate. These ideological and material hinderances by a bad raw material regime are forms of their intentional alienation and repression of many already existing ecologically sustainable ways of life and thinking.

Contrary to Marx, there are six types of alienation of environmental citizenship that are involved though only involved because of specific degradative bad raw material regime choices:

1)
Instead of merely the worker being alienated from the object or the
result of his production, whole societies (as individuals and integrating institutions) can be alienated in material
issues by small powerful material regimes of a few people with political
corruption of the major institutions toward supporting their material choice: the consumer
is alienated from the object or the result of his consumption because of
its externalities, and the consumer is alienated from their choice of
materials in a gatekept and winnowed form of supply side politics as it
gets larger and moves against demand’s interests of consumption; education becomes alienated into service of such degradation support as research funds or positions are attempted to be given only toward those supporting degradation or their 'critical research' is encouraged to be innocuous by being meaninglessly abstract; finance (including insurance policies that are supposed to reduce risk) comes to be alienated and reliance on subsidizing degradation as well--expanding risk and destroying the ecologically required basis of economics instead; and whole state frameworks become alienated from representative government by bad raw material regime defenses that corrupt them. This is
the principle of politicized ‘supply versus demand’ as scale increases that is discussed elsewhere.

2)
Instead of merely alienation arising inside productive activity itself,
it is hardly limited to productive activity. There is nothing
categorically special about productive activity that shows more
alienation than other forms of political unrepresentation down the whole
politicized consumptive infrastructure and its institutional alliances
when such all institutional relationships are oriented toward alienation/clientelism instead of representation.
Alienation at root is hardly an ‘economic’ issue; it is a political
issue and a design issue including all peoples and all institutions--across many different corrupted and unrepresentative institutional sites that can either be oriented better
toward representation and sustainability or oriented poorly toward
clientelism/alienation and unsustainability. There is nothing particular
special or unique that Marx identified in his production node of
alienation. That was merely one of 19 political-organizational choice nodes in a raw
material consumptive path of environmental flows which Marx falsely
framed as ‘economic’ because of his reductionistic intent to analyze one
particular venue of political conflict and extrapolate it to the rest
of society’s institutional forms which to the contrary can instead show a variety of
different orientations of representation or clientelism/alienation at
the same moment potentially. Instead of thus a class warfare based
reductionism on one production site in the larger institutionalized
consumer flow of materials, there is an organizational design warfare
occurring throughout all 19 positions of the consumptive path over the
degree of representation and sustainability of geographic self-interest
of the organizational form, or the degree of unrepresentation,
clientelism, gatekeeping, alienation and unsustainability in the
organizational form ignoring that geographic self-interest.

3)
Instead of because of external labor, man externalizes himself
(Self-alienation), it depends on how representative are the
organizational frameworks in which labor and the whole gamut of
consumption takes place--some organizations representative and others more clientelistic/alienating. Yes, Marx identified a form of
unrepresentative clientelism as a form of self-alienation though there
is a difference in a good, representative, mutually beneficial clientelism and
an unrepresentative clientelism that is alienation. All clientelism is not
alienation. Some is. Some is not.

4) Instead of people alienating
themselves from each other only through external labor, the alienation
is on the level of choices (a question of what kinds of choices are ecologically and personally alienating and which are ecologically and personally fulfilling, instead of all choices being alienating)--some choices are more
unrepresentative and unsustainable ones that are alienating influences, and others are more representative and
sustainable influences that are ecologically and personally fulfilling. Thus instead of categorically timeless, the alienation is
due to particular (not all) external degradative institutional design choices, material choices, and technical productions choices (and various forms of biased policy, institutional design, and alienating forms of political gatekeeping clientelism interactive with these) that
are out of sync with particular ecological and sustainable
‘species-being’ situations which would either lead to a mutual lack of
alienation when sustainable versus mutual self-alienation between people when unsustainable. This is an
alienation of all species life: an alienation of a person from
himself/herself, an alienation of a person from other people, and an
alienation of a person's particular ecological self-interest,
i.e., an alienation of their interest in being a member of a particular
region in which they encourage its durability or undermine it through
the choices of institutions, materials and technology optimized for their ecological
self-interest; and an alienation of the wider integrating institutions in societies, by them becoming corrupt historical vehicles that defend and expand such degradation and alienation. Additionally, there is thus a wider social and
cross-species geographic alienation, shared across species in an area,
instead of only Marx’s individual creativity as what is marginalized by particular state/urbanist supply-side consolidations of materials/technologies and bad institutional design choices. Regions are
alienated under unsustainability. These unrepresentative state “SSFC”
relationships (unrepresentative organizational designs of states, sciences/education curricula, consumption, and finance) lead to unsustainability and thus alienate particular
regions from political voice and material, technical, and organizational
optimal choice--whether urban or rural areas or both--in a degradative alienating leadership's rush to
integrate only clientelistic consumers politically into
clientelistic/alienating choices of materials, technologies, and
organizations. These alienating contexts of a gatekept lack of choices--institutional, material, technological, and ideological--support an environmentally and consumptively
alienating regime built from people as individualized, alienated
consumers while demoting politically and economically any
institutionally durable forms of unalienated geographic representation of
consumption that would represent all species being in a particular
region, instead of all consumption innately alienating all species beings in a particular region.

5)
Thus, it is hardly ‘capitalism’ as a strange abstract that is causing
the difficulty of degradation, an abstract derived from Marx’s reductionism gaming the
system of his analysis, instead of a wider materialism than productionism
that would show the difficulties with alienation/clientelism are a
society-wide embedded politicized raw material regime choice of alienating and clientelistic unrepresentative materials, technologies, and
organizational participation. These equally unrepresentative-clientelistic forms pressure people into alienating/clientelistic
positions of others' choices--instead of being allowed to choose external material,
technological and organizational forms involved with more representative-clientelistic and fulfilling material relationships. It is a
cross-organizational political framework instead of an economic one at
root holding people in alienation/clientelism. It is a political one of
poor social choices of materials, technologies, ideologies, and institutions biased toward supply interests dominating both the consumer interests of demand and environmental citizenship toward unsustainability and self-destruction in the long term.

6)
Thus the politics of unrepresentative state-elite-led environmental
degradation and their material, technical, and organizational pressures
to integrate people via alienation/clientelism versus a building
movement for environmental improvement through more
geographically-sensitive optimal choices of material, technical, and
organizationally representative clientelism have been the core ‘green’ dynamic of world history.
The whole dynamic is green versus gray in world history. I challenge
the whole Eurocentric modernist British economics/Marxist idea of
different eras. Instead, different ‘eras’ show the same dynamic, past or
present, at ever-wider scales of the same delocalized degradative vs. multi-regional sustainability process. Modernists like Smith or Marx liked to pretend that all the bad things were in the past and all the good things were in the present or future. This is a huge historical whitewash on nothing really changing except scale of everything bad getting larger in their eras. Thus, a second
reductionism is the historical misspecification that Marx and all
modernists (apologists and critics all held this in common) perpetrated when they talked of ‘capitalism’ supposedly
replacing ‘feudalism.’ Instead modernists were talking merely of the
early stages of their own larger ‘feudalization’ (now more commonly known as 'privatization'--a
state-supported private material, technical, and organizational
clientelism and alienation--widening into degradation, militarism, consolidation, and inbred aristocracy) that has only extended larger than previous forms of feudalization (privatization/degradation) processes in the past.

Such degradative people down the whole social path of these
degradative raw material regimes are bad only through their bad choices
of actions instead of innately bad as people: they serve as voice and
hands of creations that destroy them and benefit only further
degradation in the region--even ironically against their own
environmental self-interest and against their own consumer
self-interest.

So what is the enemy is hardly the person: it is
specific bad choices of organizational and material/technological arrangements that link such people in degradative processes and encourage people to demote or to ignore more optimal and fulfilling alternatives that already exist. This ongoing choice of curtailment--of the open future toward sustainability--is the enemy that encourages people collectively to choose and to maintain in an ongoing
fashion forms of delimited policy, delimited materials, and delimited
organizational design to support such degradative material and organizational choices that are unrepresentative for consumers and citizens. Better citizenship requires altering these
three--changing policy, changing materials and changing organizational
design--while still respecting the person who made a bad decision of leadership or followership for
the region. However, it is particularly the leadership that are the bad environmental citizens, who have ignored their own
ecological self-interest interest as well as caused damages to others
because of their bad choices have demoted their followers choices.

Thus the arrangements of consolidated
suppliers are enemies that typically (not always) fail to keep their own
environmental citizenship in mind. Typically, they equally fail at keeping the
consumer interests in mind for sustainable choices. They are embedded in
particular bad (typically supply-side biased) choices of materials and technologies that
damage the region's health, ecology, and economy in the long term--and which damage market choice both by political repression of alternatives, subsidization of the degradative ones, and by the subsequent suboptimal markets that are made to lack sustainable choices that consumers desire that follows from both of these factors. Typically, if a group creates a bad environmental context, they are creating a bad inequitable civil rights context and an market context without actual choices as well--because for degradation to proceed it has to have an undercaste population that experiences most of the externalities (that includes most consumers) and it has to have a demotion of choices in the market.

7. You can do
better. Obviously, it is easier to simply provide more material/technological choices
that are sustainable and to build your own alternative institutions at
the beginning stage of environmental citizenship instead of attempting
to alter degradative policy immediately or to think you can change
people's minds ideologically and voila, a magical change will occur materially in the external relations around them. So environmental citizenship should provide what bad raw material regimes attempt to demote: greater ideological choices, greater material choices, and greater institutional choices of sustainability toward a 'polytopia' of sustainable options suited to different regions, that each can learn from each other the arts of human-environmental integration design without alienation.

If a utopia is a description of an artificial singular ideologically designed place (and a dystopia is the dark side of achieving it), a 'polytopia' is an assortment of multiple real geographic places with multiple material and ideological opinions about what is best depending on the many regions, as a goal. A polytopian goal of an ongoing and open-future--different for different regions though all cooperating on conflict resolution to common shared cross-bioregional pollution concerns of one region upon the other--can come to find themselves and remove their many alienation from themselves, their region, their material choices, their ideological choices, and their institutions. As the working definition of the bioregional state says:

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of
electoral reforms*, green constitutional engineering additions**, and
larger Ecological Reformation like commodity reforms*** designed to
force the political process in a democracy to better represent majority concerns
about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g., water
quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and
tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of
sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called
bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional
representation, or one of various other similar names--all of which
denote democratic control of a natural commons[2]
and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path
decisions--while not removing more generalized civil rights protections
and other conflict resolutions of a larger national state. (See the link for elaboration on those asterisks).

To the contrary, leave any 'ideological debating with the degraders' alone at the start. Instead at the start, it is important to build the institutional, cultural, and material choices as resources of environmental citizenship in other words. As people see it (particularly the second group of degradation followers below supporting for different rationales any bad raw material regime), they will defect to you and/or come to talk to you instead, once the working examples are shown. This will leave the people who do attack you (instead of you attacking them) far more isolated, and then you can draw far more sympathy from their previous degradation allies to your cause of sustainability and environmental citizenship.

8. Simply destroying something--like doing property damage or something worse--fails to create environmental citizenship. It can play into the hands of the degraders. Creating something beautiful and inspiring and unalienating to a region is far more revolutionary than destruction. Simply destroying something without offering other options shows you have no clue how to leave an alienated dystopia in which you were raised to proceed to a sustainable world. As a result of your choice to associate violence and repression with sustainability, people will drift back "to the degradation that they know of, and away from the sustainable images that they know not." (a vague attempt at paraphrasing Hamlet...).

Ideologically, your interest as an environmental citizen is hardly to
set up an equally singular totalitarian framework of 'good raw material regimes' and close your borders
and minds to the world: it is to help multiple regions of the world
develop their own environmental citizenship to their different
objective and subjective quality of life that they desire in their
regions. And if some people disagree with the vision they put forward in
a particular region, that's fine and expected and please wish them well: there is always another region in which to seed
and to start another polytopian version. Because there are already so many good choices of solutions to sustainability available, there is hardly a single 'right' good solution. There should be ongoing differences of opinion in a polytopia on how to achieve a balance--whether in different historically changing regions or in merely different views about objective quality of life, subjective quality of life, and desired material interactions. Let the most successful versions be the most popular, and let their popularity grow and wane as conditions and people's desires or material changes occur. Let sustainability be an open ended polytopia of choices toward the future instead of one particular closed version of the present.

9. Who are the other allies of the bad raw material regime that you can separate from them? These are the followers of degradation--for their varied rationales. Some people that seem at first glance so deeply part of a degradative raw material regime are merely ambivalent and tied into degradative frameworks in a passive sense of a lack of other options. As an environmental citizen, help your fellow citizen and provide them wider options. If you provide them with a more sustainable choice, a more healthful choice, and they will tend to support you. In other words, my advice is to stop trying to change minds. Start trying to add material choices, add institutional alternatives, and add institutional changes for your region, which means you address your fellow environmental citizens as equals to be won over instead of badgered with the prissiness or repression of ideological conversion--as if that accomplishes anything tangible in and of itself while bad materials, bad institutions, and bad policies surround you! Do you care more about environmental citizenship or just ideological conversion? Steer toward the former in widening your fellow citizens tangible daily choices instead of attempting to reduce your fellow citizens with the latter.

10. Be aware and beware that the most excluded groups in your societies' inequalities and stratification are the ones with the worst environmental conditions and the ones with the most environmental changes required. Read up on environmental racism via Bullard's many books, or see the following video or two as an introduction to really understand what an environmental citizenship means of equal brothers and sisters in a region.

The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights 52:01 min.

"Uploaded by UCtelevision on Feb 7, 2008; Robert D. Bullard has been described as
the nation's leading authority on race and the environment. In this
presentation from UC-Santa Barbara, Bullard takes a look at the
connection between human rights and the politics of pollution. Series:
Voices [8/2006] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 11878]"

Paul Mohai: Which Came First People or Pollution? 55:36 min.

"Uploaded by UCtelevision on Feb 7, 2008; Paul Mohai, founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, discusses his recent research on racial and income disparities in the distribution of hazardous wastes sites in the U.S. Series: "Voices" [8/2006] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 11877]"

Can you really reach out to those in the most environmental and sustainable need in your region, or do you only talk about bioregionalism and sustainability among your own comfy social groups? If you do only the latter, this is hardly an environmental citizenship, even if it may be the start of it. If it stops there, it becomes just an intellectualized cult of a minority instead of the common mycelium running through the environmentally
shared conditions that effect and link us all in a particular region--and link each region to another.

This is just an American example. However, the principle, niche, and profitable, ethically fulfilling aid and service of providing sustainable solutions can be seen around the world. In this single example of Growing Power, here's a modern day hero's idea of providing both institutional, educational, and material choices that are sustainable to people in his region. This particular strategy can be replicated anywhere. As a good environmental citizen, Will Allen builds novel material choices and novel institutions in his area. He provides consumers and citizens with more material choices in the process--as well as more cultural choices--as he contributes to solving environmental inequalities and material/social inequalities of access, knowledge, and culture in his region at the same time. He does all these social things through the wider provisions of better, organic food for people who lack it. By providing the materials and institutions, he is changing the culture as well around him to be one that is based on a more even level of common sustainable environmental citizenship and common life chances, instead of people born into environmental and social inequality.

Will Allen: Growing Power - A Model for Urban Agriculture3:03 min.

"Growing Power is a sustainable urban agriculture center located in the
city of Milwaukee. It was founded by Will Allen to introduce healthier
food options to the urban community, while simultaneously demonstrating a
sustainable model for local food production."

In other words, words solving durable inequalities and cultural stereotypes in your region can be achieved as part of moving it along toward a common environmental citizenship while better materials and better institutions are provided as well. It raises all resources available that can be mobilized for sustainability and cultural commonalities in the region later as well. It demotes those adhering to degenerative raw material regimes and their social inequalities.

11. Multiple religious groups are allies in environmental citizenship, particularly if they address this issue of underclass poverty, environmental racism, and environmental underclassses. (For a U.S. example, the Civil Rights Movement for Black Americans came strongly out of the Black Church. By the 1980s, it was religious institutions that were most interested in documenting and changing environmental inequalities as well. Meanwhile, secular movements of 'environmentalism'--instead of being more open--were more closed and, shall we say, rather unethical, partisan, and repressive in their further alienating policy designs for the world's underclasses.

12. Secularly however, Waterkeeper and Riverkeeper alliances are good environmental citizenship camaraderie organizations for whole regions that do more than talk as well. In other words, a major strategic way to choose better materials is to choose better potable water for your region and organize against bad raw material regime choices:

Who are the Waterkeepers? 1:32 min.

"Who are the Waterkeepers? We are men and women drawn from different regions races and classes bound together by an extraordinary passion and motivated by our shared and unshakable believe, that clean water isn't the privilege of the few, but the basic human right of all. We know that apart we are isolated and easy to ignore, but together, as Waterkeepers, we are unstoppable. Join Us! waterkeeper.org."

13. Along the way, keep in mind that different local and non-local elite groups however will want to try to steer your environmental citizenship into particular partisan issues or abstract theoretical ideas that have nothing to do with changing investment/economic/taxation policy, providing more choices of institutions and materials, or changing degradative policy. If chosen allies ignore this they are still just cloaked degradation. Examples of these enemies are:

1) Malthusianism is still just cloaked degradation for example: some claim that people en masse are the cause of environmental problems, however people en masse are not the cause of environmental degradation: particular chosen frameworks of policies of degradation are, and particular choices of materials and unrepresentative institutions are! Killing people off fails to alter the degradative leadership that makes the decisions to degrade--in fact it just makes it easier for such degradative leadership to degrade--without opposition from particular ecological self-interests of the people in the area that have a better chance of defending their land from outside degradation. Suggested reading:

[2] EcoMarxism is just cloaked degradation as well in many (not all!) of their elite and innately clientelistic and entirely centralized state material claims of solutions to environmental issues. Such claims are just other jurisdictional and ideological mechanisms of unrepresentative centralization through which wider and more centralized material corruption and degradation ensues from even greater lack of participation in regional decisions about policy and materials. (This is hardly the case for all though: see Schnaiberg, Chapter 5, (1980) on his decentralized solutions; or see Raymond Murphy). For the kind I am talking about though, see John Bellamy Foster. Sorry, John. I have met you, I like you, and you have a good heart. However, I am unable to agree with any part of your analysis of environmental degradation, as the grand system uniformity of capitalist degradation fails to exist, and there is nothing called a unified 'treadmill' either. For critique of these assumptions, Look up some Freudenburg on the innate disproportionality of degradation sometime. Look up some Bullard on the inequities of beneficiaries of degradation as well.

[4] Thinking that all it takes to unify people is another political party alone may be a problem in organizing environmental citizenship as well. Thus, keep in mind just supporting another singular political party is hardly enough to get to sustainability. It requires a more competitive democratic party system of ongoing choices in general to avoid any party's corruption, in which at least four or five parties contend on the national level, and while perhaps a separate context of parties on the local and state elections compete as well in one branch of the legislature (i.e., since there are only local parties that can run for one branch of a state's legislature, this keeps them from getting clientelized to national level money). That story can be saved for another time. Instead of the litmus test of 'environmentalism' being one's agreement of a certain political party platform in the region, the litmus test on environmental citizenship should be does one support people freely giving themselves the right to switch to vote for the one in their region that is most representative, and does one support people freely by giving them many sustainable material choices--because degradation is caused by unrepresentative state politics and more unrepresentative and non-competitive frameworks (of both market choices and political parties). The opposite is toward sustainability: by having more representative state politics and more political party choices, and more representative and competitive frameworks of market choices. By itself a singular party is unlikely to ever get to sustainability, and if it ever attempted it would generate another clientelistic and unrepresentative context.

14. Thus in addition to that wider consumer choice and wider institutional choices on the regional level across four areas required in sustainability, wider political party choices are required. So prioritizing election competitions are pointless at present for sustainability. Institutional development and material changes is important now (see last point). However, in the future, sustainability will be unlikely to be achieved without future formal institutional checks and balances and many more informal party additions competitively within systems of states, worldwide. Greater Ecological Reformation of the whole frameworks of the state and other daily institutions in our lives can make them better environmental citizens as well. To add these larger green constitutional checks and balances later, read my book Toward a Bioregional State and some summaries here:

15. Stop worrying about what are the borders of your region in the beginning, or what the 'new flag' is, or issues of 'who is friend and who is foe' based on the territorial scale or ideological agreement alone. Get to real work on sustainability instead of filling your life with and arguing over these mental fictions. Environmental citizenship is to encourage multiple regionality instead of a particular region. Work on the material and institutional innards first, and then see what cascades. Any divisions or disagreements on objective material quality of life or subjective quality of life that develop in this process will of course happen. This is good and a part of the ongoing development of multi-regionalism and multiple experiments at getting it right instead of a sign of 'deviation.' Start to see such a plurality of options and associated regional divisions as potentially part of the wider family of regions to learn from, instead of always by definition being another hostile enemy. Instead of just setting up a novel borderline in your minds, picture how all regions are working on the same environmental citizenship together
as one, against the degradative and unrepresentative and corrupt elites that rule then
from a placeless nowhere and thus cause their degradation:

16. For environmental citizenship, a testament toward a wider assortment of civil, political, and material rights as wider human rights should be held. This faith is in a common ecumenical Ecological bill of rights for all humans and all ecological rights as intertwined, instead of framing 'human versus ecological' situations in your mind or framing 'who is in my region and who is not.' If you provide options that free all humans from their degradative external situation by providing more choices for them, you have solved half of degradation by removing its followership support as well, since most people are in degradative situations ambivalently by lack of other material and institutional choices--in situations where degradative leaderships intentionally attempt to keep them in such a lack of choices. Why would you hate those who are victims of such degradative leadership decisions instead of attempt to help them widen their choices away from it?

17. What question, if answered, would help powerful conversations and cultural change to flourish toward this environmental citizenship? The question: "Who in our region has the best environmental citizenship and environmental virtue, and who has provided us with the best environmental choices? Who is least divisive? Who is the most inspiring?' Asking these questions in an ongoing fashion can be achieved by you facilitating the start of Civic Democratic Institutions (CDIs) and Commodity Ecology Institutions (CEIs) in your region. See that link for more for you to start today on the civil and material side of the wider Ecological Reformation.

Thus the argument of the bioregional state is that sustainability is unachievable without an explicitly regional civil side of environmental citizenship combined with (instead of working against) larger formal democratic institutional change. These dynamics would would interact with other institutional additions in educational frameworks, local consumptive issues, and financial issues.

Other people have offered other methods to get to sustainability of course. What about these different methods to get there?

First, killing people, reducing population, or moving people off the land fails to save the environment. All it does is set up more rapacious outside interests destroying the environment even faster in a greenwashed environmentalism--courtesy of many global NGOs right now like the WWF.

Third, removing all states or merely secession (more on this point in another post--though people deserve the right of it if they want) is hardly a good strategy for sustainability either, because mere localism is little guarantee that the locality remains representative or sustainable. People require expanded choices in sustainability, and thus shrinking the choices of people to appeal to only the local jurisdiction removes ecological checks and balances on the corruption in local region when it happens, instead of pretending that it will 'never happen here.' Add more institutions instead of merely take them away.

Fourth, a single informal party or merely changing policy is a poor strategy
for mobilizing toward sustainability. A single party can be corrupted like the fading greenness of Die Grunen in Germany. Moreover, a single party it is a poor strategy for sustainability because support
for greenness comes from across the left-right spectrum seen in above
polls for global supermajorities supporting green politics. It is perhaps ultimately self-defeating
and self-divisive of the commonality of views on greenness to attempt to fit
'green' into one party framework. (That being said, I do support various forms
of green parties however just without expecting that the model of political
change for sustainability can ever be achieved by a singular party). These routes are only indirect, susceptible to corruption, and have a history of backsliding.

The bioregional state instead encourages a more regional environmental citizenship of sited peoples in a green humanism combined with wider material and institutional additions and expansions to regional human rights upheld by such states--unlike the (un)'green' anti-humanisms of many other pretended solutions above.

Moreover, the bioregional state argues that with so many solutions already in evidence though simply unapplied, it is unable to be said that there is a lack of solutions that is keeping sustainability from occurring. On the contrary, it is political, economic, and technological corruption and gatekeeping by bad material raw material regimes against the massive supermajorities of the world that is keeping us from sustainability. Raw material regime corruption is keeping us from living in representative democracies and maintaining a representative developmentalism. This corruption keeps us living within crony raw material regimes instead of arrangements more democratic and consumer-choice driven that would look closer to the commodity ecology arrangement instead of commodity arrangements that destroy the planet.

In existing democracies conflicts of interest corruptions keep unsustainability in place. Only by creating additional formal 'ecological checks and balances' can we address these conflicts of interest and innately allow our political economies to be more directly 'in sync' with this global support for environmentalism, sound economics, and sound health practices.

To summarize, [1] unsustainability is corruption and conflict of interest and it derives mostly from unrepresentative and corrupt state political support of degradative raw material regimes that are expanded by state powers (subsidies, differential bias in case legal decisions, etc.) against more sustainable and more regional consumer desired choices. [2] This corruption is created by people of course though these people depend on 'out of sync' formal institutional arrangements in states to create an informal gatekeeping on politics, instead of formal institutions creating representation in politics. [3] This gatekeeping and unrepresentativeness has a developmental effect toward environmental degradation and self-destruction [4] contrary to public support. [5] It is additionally contrary to polls showing sustainability to be the supermajority--a popular concern of the world.

This is why the bioregional state approaches sustainability as requiring a more regionally facilitated environmental citizenship within a more competitive democracy--to remove the informal corrupt gatekeeping frameworks to make the state a democratic institution 'in sync' with environmental concern, formally. The bioregional state would do this through over 60 additional 'ecological checks and balances'--along with other civic, non-governmental institutions like the CDIs and CEIs to facilitate the environmental citizenship from areas where it has been lost.

Getting over this morass of formal/informal material corruption and its attempt to keep you from having choices requires identifying the many conflicts of interest in 'still incomplete' democracies that require more 'ecological checks and balances' to demote informal gatekeeping and unrepresentative developmental policies and unrepresentative material choices for regions that come from a context of a lack of choice. Sustainability is a completed democracy with many additional institutional, material, and technological choices--and with many more checks and balances to help maintain those more regionally and representatively chosen materials against any ongoing or future formal and informal power corruption. Such ecological checks and balances in a context of greater choices would make developmental policy feedback automatically more representative and ecologically sound.

Several other more technocratic or even genocidal ‘utopian’ methods have been proposed of course for sustainability. The book argues against these as well, from a green humanism point of view. Only additional formal 'ecological checks and balances' and a wider animated environmental citizenship can bring our political economies 'in sync' with our already existing global support for environmentalism, sound economics, and sound health practices. Therefore, toward changing this informal political dynamic, formal institutional change in the bioregional state takes its principles from Giovanni Sartori that constitutions should be conceived of as incentive structures for voluntaristic informal party and informal interest interactions instead of repressive frameworks themselves.

Currently, if there is environmental degradation despite supermajorities of the world against it (in four major international polls since the 1990s showing it), it is assumed in the bioregional state that this means (1) there are poor informal incentive structures for interests to work toward sustainability and for encouraging multiple party systems or one-party systems from representing these concerns accurately, and (2) a form of unrepresentative degradative elite gatekeeping is being used to keep out changes that would be more representative and sustainable, as such unrepresentative elites aim to keep frameworks of bad raw material regime choices of material and technological clientelism that are self-destructive.

Second, for cognitive changes, the book itself is meant to be a cognitive and even cultural change: that those concerned with the environment should turn to green constitutional engineering, environmental citizenship, an an Ecological Reformation--instead of turning toward placeless ideologically partisan mobilizations without any regionalism to them at all. Cognitively speaking, the bioregional state however is a wider suggestion that green constitutional engineering structures are hardly enough: local ‘culturally anchoring’ institutions as a check and balance on ideologically rarefied versions of localities cultures and materials are required. We require means to assure that environmental risk is expressed as a major cross-political issue of majority citizen concern that it is, instead of expressed as a partisan one in which the latter leads to a gatekept framework responsible to only one party’s mobilization or construction of the issue against other groups of environmental citizens instead of attempting to demote particular bad choices themselves by enhancing choices.

Third, through this manner both structural and cognitive, all the technologies that already exist toward sustainability can be applied in locally optimally ways, now protected from the
political corruption that has kept them unavailable. For just a short series of
examples, there are fully electric-based, air-based, or water-based-hydrogen
powered cars in existence now. Most consumers haven't heard of them. Watch the
documentary film ``Who Killed the Electric Car" [Paine 2006]. Over 10
years ago, California introduced zero emission standards for any cars sold in
the state. International car companies of the United States and Japan like
General Motors, Honda, Toyota and Ford complied and started to put fully
electric cars on Californian streets. They had solved battery problems.
However, they didn't advertise their successes worldwide, intentionally hid the
technological solutions, and worked to remove the zero emission laws instead.
Don't believe a word of this “we're working private ecological modernization”
nonsense from the degraradative leadership. There is not an energy problem; there is a political problem of
entrenched oil interests killing off more sustainable technologies from mass
production. The film shows a bad “raw material regime” choice of oil interests
hamstringing consumer choice, biasing green technology solutions and corrupting
governments--merely to keep a self-destructive way of life intact. Thus, we still have pollution, and we still are chained to oil
because of political choices to remove consumer choices, but not because there
are technological or material requirements to consume oil anymore and certainly not because a whole 'economic system' is responsible. A very small number of degradative leadership is responsible for degradation, mostly by demoting the choices of politics, institutions, and materials in their followers.

We are living in an era of the largest social movement in history, in organizational support: global environmentalism (read: Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World). The bioregional state aims to organize it and our innate environmental citizenship; it allows for elites, just environmentally representative ones, and for a non-governmental process that recognizes local ecological virtue (CDI and CEI), personally and materially. It’s not anti-statist. It’s pro-statist. Though the current degradative organization of the state and its very thin forms of abstract individual placeless citizenship and bad raw material regime corruption are the main issues to solve--by additions of other forms of citizenship without taking away the former, and by other institutional additions of ecological checks and balances across four separate areas of states, education, consumption, and finance.

It can only help the environmental movement to have a view on state formation and citizenship, on polity creation instead of just policy creation, otherwise practitioners of mere policies and political parties are always at mercy of easily reversible or unrepresentative state policies and within such unrepresentative historical processes that lead to degradation and the destruction of what they are working for.

About Me

A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.